Optical films are widely used in the manufacture of consumer electronics, semiconductor devices, and high-performance glass and ceramic materials. Presently most of these films are manufactured using complicated and costly processes, such as sputter deposition and chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which require nonambient processing conditions, expensive specialized processing chambers, unforgiving protocols, and highly trained operators. Although improvements in conventional physical deposition techniques have allowed thin-film deposition techniques to generally keep pace with minimum performance requirements of typical optical and semiconductor applications, this performance comes at a significant cost.
Therefore, a simpler and less expensive optical coating method is needed.